"FIRST THINGS FIRST, hip-hop is not just the music, and women have played a big role in shaping the way it looks today. FIRST THINGS FIRST takes readers on a journey through some notable firsts by women in hip-hop history and their importance. Factual firsts like Queen Latifah becoming the first rapper to get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Lauryn Hill making history as the first rapper to win the coveted Album of the Year Award at the GRAMMYs,...

Hip-hop (and other things) is about, as it were, rap, but also some other things. It spends the entirety of its time celebrating what has become the most dominant form of music these past two and a half decades. Tupac is in there. Jay Z is in there. Missy Elliott is in there. Drake is in there. Pretty much all of the big names are in there, as are a bunch of the smaller names, too. There's art from illustrator Arturo Torres, there are infographics...

"Despite increasing popular attention to issues of diversity and under-representation in architecture, power and control within the profession remain in the hands of white men. Of all the creative forms, architecture remains the least accessible to the inhabitants of deprived urban neighborhoods. The absence of a significant minority presence in the field reinforces the disconnect between designers and users. But things are changing. Hip-Hop Architecture...

"From underground roots to mainstream popularity, hip-hop's influence on music and entertainment around the world has been nothing short of extraordinary. Ode to Hip-Hop chronicles the journey with profiles of fifty albums that have defined, expanded, and ultimately transformed the genre into what it is today. From 2 Live Crew's groundbreaking As Nasty As They Wanna Be in 1989 to Cardi B's similarly provocative Invasion of Privacy almost thirty years...

"The essential oral history of hip-hop, from its origins on the playgrounds of the Bronx to its reign as the most powerful force in pop culture--from the award-winning journalist behind All the Pieces Matter, the New York Times bestselling oral history of The Wire. The music that we would later know as hip-hop was born at a party in the Bronx in the summer of 1973. Now, fifty years later, it's the most popular genre in America and its electric impact...

From Geto Boys legend and renowned storyteller Scarface comes a passionate memoir about how hip-hop changed the life of a kid from the south side of Houston, and how he rose to the top--and ushered in a new generation of rap dominance Scarface is the celebrated rapper whose hits include "On My Block," "Mind Playing Tricks on Me," and "Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta" (made famous in the cult film Office Space). The former president of Def Jam South,...

"Treating the work of hip-hop artists from the last several decades like sacred scripture, this book traces the history of hip-hop and uses it as a conduit to tell the modern story of Black Liberation in this country, following the bloody trail from the end of the Civil Rights era until the day George Floyd was sacrificed on the streets of America"--

Chery Etienne has her own hip-hop dance crew, but now some of them are moving away and she will have to try out for her middle school's hip-hop dance team, although since she has never had any formal training she is not sure her unique style will be welcome.